The term women's rights refers to freedoms and entitlements of women and
girls of all ages. These rights may or may not be
institutionalized, ignored or suppressed by law, local custom, and
behavior in a particular society. These liberties are grouped
together and differentiated from broader notions of human rights because
they often differ from the freedoms inherently possessed by or
recognized for men and boys, and because activists for this issue
claim an inherent historical and traditional bias against the
exercise of rights by women and girls.[1]

Issues commonly associated with notions of women's rights
include, though are not limited to, the right: to bodily integrity
and autonomy; to vote (suffrage); to hold public
office; to work; to fair wages or equal pay; to own property; to
education; to serve in the military or be conscripted; to enter
into legal contracts; and to have marital, parental
and religious rights.[2]
Women and their supporters have campaigned and in some places
continue to campaign for the same rights as men.[2]

History

According to Dr. Jamal A. Badawin "the status which women
reached during the present era was not achieved due to the kindness
of men or due to natural progress. It was rather achieved through a
long struggle and sacrifice on woman's part and only when society
needed her contribution and work, more especial!; during the two
world wars, and due to the escalation of technological change."[3]

Ancient
civilisations

Hindu scriptures describe a good wife as
follows "a woman whose mind, speech and body are kept in
subjection, acquires high renown in this world, and, in the next,
the same abode with her husband." In ancient Athens women
were always minors and subject to a male, such as their father,
brother or some other male kin. A women's consent in marriage was
not generally thought to be necessary and women were obliged to
submit to the wishes of her parents or husband. In ancient Rome a wife
was considered "a minor, a ward, a person incapable of doing or
acting anything according to her own individual taste, a person
continually under the tutelage and guardianship of her husband."
Under Roman Law a woman and her property passed into the power of
her husband upon marriage. The wife was considered the purchased property of her husband,
acquired only for his benefit. Furthermore women
in Ancient Rome could not exercise any civil or public office,
and could not act as witness, surety, tutor, or curator. Women were
also not allowed to make a will or contract.[3]

The general improvement of the status of Arab women included
prohibition of female
infanticide and recognizing women's full personhood.[9]
"The dowry, previously regarded
as a bride-price
paid to the father, became a nuptial gift retained by the wife as
part of her personal property."[4][5]
Under Islamic law, marriage
was no longer viewed as a "status" but rather as a "contract", in which the
woman's consent was imperative.[4][5][9]
"Women were given inheritance rights in a patriarchal society that had previously
restricted inheritance to male relatives."[4]Annemarie
Schimmel states that "compared to the pre-Islamic position of
women, Islamic legislation meant
an enormous progress; the woman has the right, at least according
to the letter of the law, to
administer the wealth she has brought into the family or has earned
by her own work."[10]

The Middle
Ages

According to English Common
Law, which developed from the 12th Century onward all property
which a wife held at the time of a marriage became a possession of
her husband. Eventually English courts forbid a husband's
transferring property without the consent of his wife, but he still
retained the right to manage it and to receive the money which it
produced.[3]
"French married women suffered from restrictions on their legal
capacity which were removed only in 1965."[11]
In the 16th century, the Reformation in Europe allowed
more women to add their voices, including the English writers Jane Anger, Aemilia Lanyer, and
the prophetess Anna
Trapnell. Despite relatively greater freedom for Anglo-Saxon
women, until the mid-nineteenth century, writers largely
assumed that a patriarchal
order was a natural order that had existed.[12]
This perception was not seriously challenged until the eighteenth
century when Jesuit missionaries found matrilineality in
native North American peoples.[13]

In the late 18th Century the question of women's rights became
central to political debates in both France and Britain. At the
time some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, who defended
democratic principles of equality and challenged notions that a
privileged few should rule over the vast majority of the
population, believed that these principles should be applied only
to their own gender and their own race. The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau for example thought
that it was the order of nature for woman to obey men. He wrote
"Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws" and
claimed that "when she tries to usurp our rights, she is our
inferior".[15]

In 1791 the French playwright and political activistOlympe de Gouges published the Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,[16]
modelled on the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. The
Declaration is ironic in formulation and exposes the failure of the
French
Revolution, which had been devoted to equality. It states that: “This revolution
will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their
deplorable condition, and of the rights they have lost in society”.
The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
follows the seventeen articles of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen point for point and has
been described by Camille Naish as “almost a parody... of the
original document”. The first article of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaims that “Men are born and
remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based
only on common utility.” The first article of Declaration of the
Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen replied: “Woman is born free
and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may only be
based on common utility”. De Gouges expands the sixth article of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which
declared the rights of citizens to take part in the formation of
law, to:

Australian women's rights were lampooned in this 1887 Melbourne
Punch cartoon: A hypothetical female member foists her baby's
care on the House Speaker

“All citizens including women are equally admissible to all
public dignities, offices and employments, according to their
capacity, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues
and talents”.

De Gouges also draws attention to the fact that under French law
women were fully punishable, yet denied equal rights.[17]

Mary
Wollstonecraft, a British writer and philosopher, published
A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman in 1792, arguing that it was the education
and upbringing of women that created limited expectations.[18][19]
Wollstonecraft attacked gender oppression, pressing for equal
educational opportunities, and demanded "justice!" and "rights to
humanity" for all.[20]

The 19th
Century

"We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have
restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the
actual bondservant of her husband; no less so, as far as the legal
obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called."[3]

During the 1800s women in the United States and Britain began to
challenge laws that denied them the right to their property once
they married. Under the common law doctrine of coverture husbands
gained control of their wives' real estate and wages. Beginning in
the 1840s, state legislatures in the United States[21] and
the British Parliament[22] began
passing statutes that protected women's property from their
husbands and their husbands' creditors. These laws were known as
the Married Women's Property Acts.[23]
Courts in the nineteenth-century United States also continued to
require privy examinations of married women who sold their
property. A privy examination was a practice in
which a married woman who wished to sell her property had to be
separately examined by a judge or justice of the peace outside of
the presence of her husband and asked if her husband was pressuring
her into signing the document.[24]

During the 19th Century women began to agitate for the right to vote and participate in government
and law making.[25]
The ideals of women's suffrage developed alongside
that of universal suffrage and today women's
suffrage is considered a right (under the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women). During the 19th Century the right to vote was
gradually extended in many countries and women started to campaign
for their right to vote. In 1893 New Zealand became the first
country to give women the right to vote on a national level.
Australia gave women the right to vote in 1902, while the USA,
Britain and Canada gave women the vote after the First World War.[26]Sweden would also be a
contestant as the first independent nation to grant women the right
to vote. Conditional female suffrage was granted in Sweden during
the age of liberty (1718–1771)[27
]

Modern
movement

In the subsequent decades women's rights again became an
important issue in the English speaking world. By the 1960s the
movement was called "feminism" or "women's liberation." Reformers
wanted the same pay as men, equal rights in law, and the freedom to
plan their families or not have children at all. Their efforts were
met with mixed results.[30]

In the UK, a public groundswell of opinion in favour of legal
equality had gained pace, partly through the extensive employment
of women in what were traditional male roles during both world
wars. By the 1960s the legislative process was being readied,
tracing through MP Willie Hamilton's select committee report, his Equal Pay For
Equal Work Bill, the creation of a Sex Discrimination Board, Lady
Sear's draft sex anti-discrimination bill, a government Green
Paper of 1973, until 1975 when the first British Sex
Discrimination Act, an Equal Pay Act, and an Equal Opportunities
Commission came into force.[31][32] With
encouragement from the UK government, the other countries of the EEC soon followed suit with an
agreement to ensure that discrimination laws would be phased out
across the European Community.

In the USA, the National Organization for
Women (NOW) was created in 1966 with the purpose of bringing
about equality for all women. NOW was one important group that
fought for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
This amendment stated that "equality of rights under the law shall
not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on
account of sex."[33] But
there was disagreement on how the proposed amendment would be
understood. Supporters believed it would guarantee women equal
treatment. But critics feared it might deny women the right be
financially supported by their husbands. The amendment died in 1982
because not enough states had ratified it. ERAs have been included
in subsequent Congresses, but have still failed to be ratified.[34]

In the last three decades of the 20th century, Western women
knew a new freedom through birth control, which enabled women to
plan their adult lives, often making way for both career and
family. The movement had been started in the 1910s by US pioneering
social reformer Margaret Sanger[35] and
in the UK and internationally by Marie Stopes.

Over the course of the 20th century women took on greater roles
in society such as serving in government. In the United States some
served as U.S. Senators and others as
members of the U.S. Cabinet. Many women took
advantage of opportunities in higher education. In the United
States at the beginning of the 20th century less than 20% of all
college degrees were earned by women. By the end of the century
this figure had risen to about 50%.[36]

Progress was made in professional opportunities. Fields such as
medicine, law, and science opened to include more women. At the
beginning of the 20th century about 5% of the doctors in the United
States were women. As of 2006, over 38% of all doctors in the
United States were women, and today, women make almost 50% of the
medical student population. While the numbers of women in these
fields increased, many women still continued to hold clerical,
factory, retail, or service jobs. For example, they worked as
office assistants, on assembly lines, or as cooks.[36][37]

The United Nations and
womens' rights

In 1946 the United Nations established a Commission
on the Status of Women.[38][39]
Originally as the Section on the Status of Women, Human Rights
Division, Department of Social Affairs, and now part of the Economic and
Social Council (ECOSOC). Since 1975 the UN has held a series of
world conferences on women's issues, starting with the World
Conference of the International Women's Year in Mexico City. These
conferences created an international forum for women's rights, but
also illustrated divisions between women of different cultures and
the difficulties of attempting to apply principles universally[40]

The Convention defines discrimination against women in the
following terms:

Any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of
sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the
recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their
marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human
rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social,
cultural, civil or any other field.

It also establishes an agenda of action for putting an end to
sex-based discrimination for which states ratifying the Convention
are required to enshrine gender equality into their domestic
legislation, repeal all discriminatory provisions in their laws,
and enact new provisions to guard against discrimination against
women. They must also establish tribunals and public institutions
to guarantee women effective protection against discrimination, and
take steps to eliminate all forms of discrimination practiced
against women by individuals, organizations, and enterprises.

Maputo
Protocol

The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights
on the Rights of Women in Africa, better known as the Maputo
Protocol, was adopted by the African Union on 11 July 2003 at its
second summit in Maputo[44], Mozambique. On 25
November 2005, having been ratified by the required 15 member
nations of the African Union, the protocol entered into force.[45] The
protocol guarantees comprehensive rights to women including the
right to take part in the political process, to social and
political equality with men, and to control of their
reproductive health, and an end to
female genital mutilation[46]

Reproductive rights are understood as rights of both men and
women, but are most frequently advanced as women's rights. The United Nations Population
Fund (UNPF) and the World Health Organization
(WHO) advocate for reproductive rights with a primary emphasis on
women's rights. The idea of these rights were first discussed as a
subset of human rights at the United Nation's 1968 International
Conference on Human Rights. The sixteenth article of the
Proclamation of Teheran recognises reproductive rights as a subset of
human rights and
states, "Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and
responsibly the number and the spacing of their children."[49]

Abortion

Women's access to legal abortions is restricted by law in most
countries in the world.[51]
Even where abortion is
permitted by law, women may only have limited access to safe
abortion services. Only a small number of countries prohibit
abortion in all cases. In most countries and jurisdictions,
abortion is allowed to save the pregnant woman's life, or where the
pregnancy is the result of rape or
incest.[52]

"Abortion is a highly emotional subject and one that excites
deeply held opinions. However, equitable access to safe abortion
services is first and foremost a human right. Where abortion is
safe and legal, no one is forced to have one. Where abortion is
illegal and unsafe, women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies
to term or suffer serious health consequences and even death.
Approximately 13% of maternal deaths worldwide are attributable to
unsafe abortion—between 68,000 and 78,000 deaths annually."[52]

Furthermore, they argue that "...international human rights
legal instruments and authoritative interpretations of those
instruments compel the conclusion that women have a right to decide
independently in all matters related to reproduction, including the
issue of abortion."[52]
Human Rights Watch argues that "the denial of a pregnant woman's
right to make an independent decision regarding abortion violates
or poses a threat to a wide range of human rights." Basing its
analysis on the authoritative interpretations of international
human rights instruments by UN expert bodies Human Rights Watch
states that where women's access to safe and legal abortion
services are restricted, the following human rights may be at risk: the right to life, the
right to
health (or health care), right to freedom from
discrimination, right to security of person, the right to liberty, the right to privacy, the right to information, the right to be free
from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment , the right to decide
the number and spacing of children (reproductive rights), the right to
freedom of
thought, and the right to freedom of religion.[53][54]

Other groups however, such as the Catholic Church, regard abortion not as
a right but as a 'moral evil'.[55]

Rape as an element
of the crime of genocide

In 1998, the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established by the United Nations
made landmark decisions that rape
is a crime of genocide
under international law. The trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba
Commune in Rwanda, established
precedents that rape is an element
of the crime of genocide. The Akayesu judgement includes the first
interpretation and application by an international court of the
1948
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide. The Trial Chamber held that rape, which it defined as
"a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under
circumstances which are coercive", and sexual assault constitute
acts of genocide insofar as they were committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a targeted group, as such. It found
that sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of
destroying the Tutsi ethnic
group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated
against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required
for those acts to constitute genocide.[56]

Judge Navanethem Pillay said in a statement
after the verdict: “From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as
spoils of war. Now it will be considered a
war crime. We want to send out a strong message that rape is no
longer a trophy of war.”[57]
An estimated 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 Rwandan
Genocide.[58]

Women's Rights is a movement and action of feminism, where women believe they rightfully deserve what men have. Women's Rights have fought things such as letting women vote and do mens' jobs such as doing construction work and even right to marriage. Although women and men can both stand for this movement, mainly women stand for it. Movements such as impeaching and so on have created rights for women.